Make love, not Warcraft

Yes... I know. It is stealing (the title of this blog post is also a title of a South Park episode), but it just fit perfectly, so I decided to go ahead with it.
I shall be handing pearls of "wisdom" about game addiction today. Not gambling, but videogames. At first it seems that game addiction is only a fiction, like unicorns, flying saucers and tasty soya milk. Well, many researchers claim otherwise.

What made me write this post were two things. The first one was an article I read on BBC news, and promptly dismissed as humbug. They reported on the opening of the first game addiction rehabilitation centre in Europe, namely Smith and Jones in the Netherlands. I read it with interest; it's not something one runs across every day. But it just didn't seem plausible to me - these are just games, there is nothing real about them, nor about the virtual world that is created. OK, admitedly, this reasoning is flawed, but I shan't elaborate on that further. The point lies elsewhere.

The second reason I'm writing this is Ultima VII. Good ol' Ultima VII, the most advanced RPG back in the day ("the day" was 1992). It doesn't look to shabby by today's standards either. The game is about going somewhere else, to an alternate reality, to a land called Brittania. Being there one is on the mission to save Brittania and it's inhabitants from the clutches of evil once again (after all, this IS Ultima VII). Effectively one leaves ones own reality and immerses oneselfself deeply into another, virtual reality - mayhap just as complex as your own.

Now, happily roaming around Brittania (still not believing game addiction is real) I see odd things taking shape in my own reality - you know, during the time my computer is turned off. First I see myself turning my computer off at odd hours (once I started playing it around ten in the evening, and went to sleep around 6 o'clock). I think about the game quite often - I make plans and strategies how to best tackle a situation in the game. I even dreamt a few times about it.

Whoa there! Sounds like symptoms of game addiction to me. Is it possible? Has the unthinkable happened? Have I perhaps become... addicted? Well, I don't think so. Not yet, at least. But I see a certain possibility there. If circumstances were right, if I had more time, I guess it could happen.

Like drugs. But unlike drugs games are a bit more heinous - they don't have that certain aura of danger and seriousness about them. If one gets involved with hard drugs, one can be fairly certain it's not going to end well. But games are with us from the start - they are being placed in our crib, accompany us through our childhood and even in our adult life. In our society it is normal to play, and computer games are an integral part of this "play". The bottomline is: when we first encounter games, we don't percieve games as an enemy.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to picture games as a danger to society, far from it. They are a fun way to kill time; they can even be used for different training purposes. But I see a danger that comes in the form of game addiction, especially with games that lure the player from parting with his real life and "making a living" in a world that does not exist (e. g. Second life). The main danger may not be deterioration of ones health (although according to wikipedia such symptoms may occur), but the deterioration of the mind and loosing the grasp of reality - I assume it gets harder to distinguish reality from fiction up to the point where one looses all social skills and is unable to function as a member of society.

I guess we could ask ourselves new about the relative reality of this virtual reality. Is it really not existing? Or is it only non-existent to the non-participating observer? If yes, then being part of this virtual reality wouldn't qualify as living in a virtual world and running away from reality. But then I wonder: how does a hot dog taste in Second life? Kolatkar